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I could leave. I could just leave, pretend that I didn’t see it, and go to Evie’s and hide for a while. But I don’t. I take a moment to gather myself, and the wheels start turning. I think of my friends. I wonder what I would tell them to do. I gather myself, and then make my way up two flights of stairs and down the hall to Alex’s apartment and knock on the door. I probably wouldn’t tell them to do this.
“Hey,” he says, reaching towards my waist once it’s open, but I take a small step back. “What’s up?”
“Um, so Cori came to The Post Office tonight. She told me…about everything that happened with you two,” I say plainly.
“Okay…whatever she said, Ruby, I’m sure it wasn’t true. Why don’t you come in and we can talk about—”
I take my hand out of my jacket pocket and unfurl it, revealing the small camera I had found on the bookshelf, and say nothing. I wait.
“Ruby…” he says, “it’s not what you think…”
“Stop,” I tell him. “Just stop. I already called the police, Alex.”
“Fuck, Ruby. What the fuck—”
“They’ll be here soon, so we don’t have a lot of time to talk. So please, just tell me something real,” I say. My eyes fill with tears again, and in his I see something that I wasn’t expecting. I’d expected anger, rage even. Instead, I see raw emotion, hurt, and genuine remorse. It trips me up, but only for a second. I almost reach out to him, too.
“I didn’t mean to do this…to you, Ruby. I never wanted to be like this with you. It’s like…a sickness, I guess. You were so authentic, and your pain was so palpable already. You didn’t deserveme, but I couldn’t just leave you alone, either, because I do love you. There’s no one like you.”
That’s what I keep hearing. At this point, it can’t be a good thing.
“Stop. Just—don’t say that to me anymore.”
“Then you started dating that fucking guy and I just flipped the fuck out. But Ruby, now you know, okay, it’s all out on the table and you know what? Maybe we can move past it. Maybe this is a good thing. You can help me stop. You can tell the cops that you made a mistake, and we can be together.”
“I don’t know you! You say that it’s all out on the table, Alex, but what about your parents? What about your whole fucking happy family living the suburban dream in Sammamish, and all those stories you told me about your sad, tortured life that made me feel like you understood me being completely fucking fake? What about that?”
“Okay, yeah, I made some of that stuff up, but you don’t know what it was like growing up with them. They never understood me, okay, not like you do. It was a fucking nightmare, Ruby. They may as well have been dead so—”
“No! No, Alex. Don’t. It’s not the same. It’s not the fucking same, and you have no idea—no fucking idea—how not the same it is.”
We hear footsteps and turn to see the police making their way down the hall. “Is there anything else I should know before I find it out from them?”
“Yeah,” he says, sounding defeated. “There’s another one on top of your kitchen cabinets. And I took your computer. I’m sorry. I didn’t even need it. I already had access to your phone. I just wanted to ruin your night.”
“Well, you succeeded,” I say, unable to hold the tears back now. “You ruinedeverything, Alex.” I start to make my way back down the hallway, toward the police officers.
“It’s not too late, Ruby!” he calls out after me.
I turn back, look at him one last time, and sob out the words, “Yeah it is, Alex. You made me so fucking sad.”
seventeen
“Somethingiswrongwithme, Evie,” I say, the next morning, after waking up on her couch. “Something is seriously wrong, deep in the core of my being.”
“No,” she says, “It’s not you. You didn’t do anything wrong. It was him.”
“You don’t have to do that. I did a lot of stuff wrong. I really, really, hurt Jake. I’ve never hurt anyone like that in my life, and it feels so fucking bad that I can barely breathe. How are there people out there that do shit like this, hurt people, and then they just get up the next day and live their lives, and then do it again? To their friends, to the people they love, to their fucking children…how do they reconcile something like that?”
“They’re bad people. You’re not a bad person, or you wouldn’t feel this way.”
“Maybe not, but thereissomething wrong with me. You knew, Aria knew, Cori’s friends and family all knew there was something off with Alex. You could feel it in your gut that there was something wrong, but I didn’t. I thought I had this special ability to see in him something that no one else could. My instincts are all off. I’m missing something essential. I can’t live like this anymore, Evie.”
It was true. I’d had maybe only a taste of what it was like to be loved, to trust someone, and to be in a normal relationship, but it was enough to know that it was something that I wanted now. I just have no idea how to do it.
“Okay,” she says, and I’m both relieved and kind of disappointed when she doesn’t argue that I’m just fine, and I don’t need to change anything. “What do you want to do about it? How can I help you do something about it?”
“I need help,” I say. “I think I need to get real, psychiatric help. I need to move! He’ll be back; I can’t stay there anymore. I can’t live below him.”
